Welcome to the second Skertch. A Skertch is a mini challenge. A mini challenge involves tasks that are fairly simple, easy to do for individuals. However, these Skertches can lead to more than just a simple trivial practice in CG. Keep that in mind!

Skertch #2 -- [ Rig and Pose A Mannequin ]Rig and pose a 3D Mannequin. A Mannequin, in animation, is a body whose parts are separated at their joints and animated without mesh deformations. That is to say, they aren't skinned (in Anim8or terms), and instead the individual parts are assigned to the individual bones in the underlying rig. The purpose is to focus on form and gesture through actions in animation, enabling the user to strengthen their foundations and conceptualize ideas.

In the previous Skertch, the objective was to model a mannequin. As you might have guessed already, the next step is to rig it. You may use any of the posted mannequins in the previous Skertch. If you want to use your own that you made in the previous Skertch, you may do so.

Requirements

Rig the model in the Figure Editor

You may use either skinning or individual bone assignments (see Notes below)

Pose (do not animate!) the figure in the Sequence Editor or Scene Editor, and then render the single frame in the Scene Editor using a simple but nice scene setup with lighting, shadows, and antialiasing. You may use simple primitives (cubes, spheres, cones, cylinders, pyramids) if you want to pose it interacting with objects. Do not make detailed scene props.

Post the .an8 file and the rendered image as attachments in this topic

NotesYou may either skin the mannequin or assign each part of the mannequin to its corresponding bone. Methods to do so are described here. Refer to the manual or forum and/or experiment if you do not know how to perform some of these actions.

Skinning: Even if you go the Skinning route, you are not allowed to have any vertices influenced by more than one bone. That is to say, a single component of the mannequin must be influenced entirely by a single bone and no other bones. Note that a bone may have more than one mannequin component, if it makes sense to do so. To perform this kind of skinning,

Add the object with all of the mannequin's components to a bone in the figure.

Create a full skeleton for the mannequin, with each bone being placed at its corresponding mannequin component. Create this skeleton with animation in mind--what's the best way to rig it so that it can handle any animation requirement? You may need to have supplementary bones to aid in various motions later.

You may set bone rotation limits, though I recommend having no limits

Click on the Multi-bone Skin tool <S> and click on the object.

Hit No (Painted Weights) in the resulting popup dialog.

Go to Build->Weight Brush... and input a weight of 1

Right-click on a bone to activate it in order to paint its influences

Left-click and drag over the vertices of the mannequin part that corresponds to that bone until those vertices are painted 100% the same color of the activated bone.

Repeat steps 7 & 8 for each mannequin part, making sure that each mannequin part is influenced by only one bone.

It may be useful to hide parts in the object editor while painting other parts in the Figure editor, so that you can avoid inadvertently painting parts you don't want to paint

Individual Bone Assigments: This is a more straightforward approach that is applicable for imitating real-life mannequins. but is more tedious and not effective for organic characters. To do this,

Make a new object for each mannequin part

In the original mannequin object, copy each part to its corresponding object (I recommend keeping the original mannequin intact)

In the figure editor, make a bone and add the original mannequin object to it.

Create a full skeleton for the mannequin, with each bone being placed at its corresponding mannequin component. Create this skeleton with animation in mind--what's the best way to rig it so that it can handle any animation requirement? You may need to have supplementary bones to aid in various motions later.

You may set bone rotation limits, though I recommend having no limits

Now select each individual bone and add its corresponding object to it, positioning and rotating it until it overlaps the original's precisely

When finished, remove the original mannequin object from the figure

Add the Figure to a Scene. If you want its pose to interact with other basic primitives, it'll probably be easier to pose it directly within the Scene Editor. Otherwise you can pose it in the Sequence Editor and then add the Sequence to the Figure within the Scene Editor.

Next add any primitives, lights with shadow parameters, and enable antialiasing. Render the image.

Post the image and attach the .an8 file and any associated files in the same post. You're finished with this stage! Do a good job rigging, there are at least 3 more challenges that'll use this rig in the future!

Quick question: Is there a maximum number of bones that can be in a hierarchy? The reason I ask, I have rigged the T-Rex and I'm working on a pose, and in Scene mode when I rotate the 23rd tail bone from the root bone in the pelvis it rotates without it's dependent bones 24 to 42 (to the tip of the tail) moving, as if the rest of the bones are freely positioned in space. Oddly, this happens after bone 27 in Sequence mode, as if there is a different maximum in each. Anybody encountered this? I can do a work-around but it's a PITA.

Screenshot below for clarity (Scene mode), you can see that from vertebra 23 the bones to the right do not rotate with it. The Figure rig appears ok right to the tip of the tail and there is no difference I can detect between bones 23 and 24 in Figure mode. (NB: I have rotated bones 21 thru 25 by the same amount in the Z dimension. The same broken bone hierarchy happens in the other dimensions). In Figure mode the same thing happens but after bone 27.

EDIT: It appears the fault originates in Figure mode, I'm re-rigging from bone 22 on to see what the problem is and if it recurs.

Definitely looks like there is a limit on the number of bones that can be in a single parent/child string, about 27 I think, beyond which they behave as free-floating bones rather than oriented to their parent. I've had to separately rig the end of the tail from the pelvis as shown, bit of a pain but looks like it will work.

Rigging is complete and the first pose done. The max-bones-in-hierarchy thing was a bit of a blow, but the work-around did the job ok. If downloading the file please note that it requires a build that includes object scaling in figure mode, I'm not sure when this was introduced but I worked this up in 1140. If opening the file in an earlier version the tail will not taper, all vertebrae will be the same size.

Funny how you reached that bones limit and defied that "not likely to happen" assumption

Yeah... hilarious! It'd been so long since I've rigged in Anim8or that I assumed I'd done something wrong. The workaround was fine for the pose, though I suspect it'll be a bit of a pain for the inevitable animation skertch!

Wow- I JUST realized that it's much smarter to just reuse the same object in the figure if that's possible, rather than having an individual object for each body part. How foolish of me.. I'm (re-)working on my rig as we speak

HERE it is! And nutso- I didn't have the Key Bones button selected when I started posing him in the sequence mode so it didn't save his arm positions for scene mode. I rendered in the sequence editor if that's okay.

My process for posing has become FAR streamlined when I figured out that the different mouse buttons (MMB, LMB, RMB) rotate things on different axii. It has to have been one of my favorite "features I didn't know about".

I did his body in three separate segments, as gives him more flexibility, which in turns yields greater "humanescence" (this word will live forever). I kinda wish he had more fist-like hands to enhance this pose.

NOTES: I also added a black dot onto his severely round head so you can tell what direction his head is facing. Also, this is a 'Redux" version because when I realized I could use one body part for both sides if it's symmetrical, I decided to make a new file to do it in.

Good job finishing this stage davdud101. It'd be nice if you took the time to create an AA, lights w/ shadows, based scene setup and render. After all, it's part of what the challenge calls for. The primary reason it's asked for is to reinforce the habit of making a well thought-out presentation of your work, regardless of what kind of work it is. How you present it directly influences how others care about it. If you show apathy and present less than the minimum, the viewers will reflect that apathy. If you show care, that gets reflected instead. Users like $imon, ENSONIQ5, and ronaldefarmer are good examples to follow.

Another reason for the requirement is practice, and another is to start you thinking about composition ahead of the next challenges. You can run Anim8or on a Macbook with Boot Camp or other software, so forward thinking is still A-OK

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My process for posing has become FAR streamlined when I figured out that the different mouse buttons (MMB, LMB, RMB) rotate things on different axii. It has to have been one of my favorite "features I didn't know about".

This will change once Steve applies the changes he made to the Figure editor (in the latest dev releases) to the Sequence and Scene editors. Animation will be a lot more intuitive with the screen-based rotation, the ability to rotate bones just by clicking and dragging on them (in fast select mode) and the rotation widget.

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I did his body in three separate segments, as gives him more flexibility, which in turns yields greater "humanescence" (this word will live forever). I kinda wish he had more fist-like hands to enhance this pose.

I did his body in three separate segments, as gives him more flexibility, which in turns yields greater "humanescence" (this word will live forever). I kinda wish he had more fist-like hands to enhance this pose.

By all means, you can make changes to his body and give him palm and finger blocks (like mittens), or even go all the way and give him individual finger components like others have. You can also modify the head to give him a nose-shaped formation or brow if you think it'll help. Don't get too detailed though...that's for something two challenges from now

Another reason for the requirement is practice, and another is to start you thinking about composition ahead of the next challenges. You can run Anim8or on a Macbook with Boot Camp or other software, so forward thinking is still A-OK

I actually didn't know about Boot Camp, like a fool. Gotta find my Win7 installation disc. I'm definitely going to go forward with this challenge now! (And make those changes so I can render him in scene mode)